Neglected provinces need share of new wealth

A senior UN official has warned that Angola risks losing its post war gains if it does not create more jobs and increase investment in the neglected interior of the country. “The highest priority is to create employment. Without it they [the youth] don’t get the benefits of peace,” said Pierre-Francois Pirlot, UN Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative. Angola is sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest oil producer after Nigeria, pumping 1.4 million barrels a day – a figure the government expects to rise to 2 million barrels by the end of 2007. The country is currently in the middle of a reconstruction boom fuelled by high oil prices after a ruinous 27 year civil war ended in 2002. “The government is starting to look to the interior, but the challenges are enormous,” Pirlot said. Despite being one the world’s fastest growing economies and reaping the windfall of record-beating crude prices, the majority of people still live on less than US $1 a day, according to UNDP. Critics add that most investment, so far, has taken place either in the country’s lucrative offshore oil industry, which employs less than 1 percent of the population, or in the country’s coastal urban centres where most of the government’s support resides. “The provinces have been neglected for decades, during the war and during the colonial period,” said Pirlot. “For example, [approximately] 98 percent of medical doctors are in Luanda – it’s as astronomic as that. How do you attract doctors to the provinces, where there are no roads, no schools, no markets?” Angola’s government coffers have seen a huge rise in external credit recently - a primary factor in the government’s bumper 2006 budget of around $25 billion compared to just $13 billion in 2005 – and much of this is earmarked for rebuilding the country’s shattered infrastructure. According to the Minister for Public Works, Higino Carneiro, the country’s road rehabilitation programme approved last year aims to repair 1,200km of roads. One such project includes the rebuilding of a road linking the southern ports of Lobito and Benguela. A separate Chinese-built $240 million highway will connect Luanda to northern Negage, 400km to the north, and is expected to be completed next year. Work has already started on the Benguela railway linking the interior to Lobito and Benguela. The 1,354km railway used to be a major artery for the transportation of minerals from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the coast. It also served as a catalyst for the growth of Angola’s provincial cities of Huambo and Kuito. Analysts say rebuilding infrastructure in the interior would also help diversify the economy away from its overwhelming reliance on oil and stimulate the country’s once thriving agricultural sector, providing jobs and relieving social pressures on the overcrowded capital. “You need long-term investors…not lines of credit,” Pirlot said. “With more than 60 percent of the population under 25, if you don’t create employment you’re looking for trouble.”